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A double miss!

Completely whiffed on the Wednesday feature yesterday. Whoops. This just a day after I skipped a planned Tuesday feature. It seems that, in my haste to be hasty, I’ve been too hasty. That’s the problem with speeding up, or taking one’s time, or both. Anyway, apologies for missing out on the markers. I’ll return to them next Wednesday. We’ll talk music below. But first … today was a peaceful, relaxing, “What was I supposed to be doing again? Oh, that’s right, nothing.” sort of day.

And then, breaking news via email. Isn’t that something? Wasn’t that something?

Usually, I know about the story before the emails come out. Social media, despite it’s many frustrations, is a swift informer. But I hadn’t been on any of the apps in a bit, and then the New York Times wrote.

My lovely bride was swimming laps at the time. When she was finished I told her the news, and we set about wondering what the comedians and the satirists would say.

I also looked back at what I was doing on this day a year ago. We were in Alabama, and it seems I was looking at the ol’ family tree.

Five years ago, I said one of those bike things that sounds like something profound in a waxy wrapper of nothing. Still seems true, though.

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Ten years ago, we were in Alaska.

There’s no way in the world that was a decade ago.

Fifteen years ago, we were in Savannah, and Tybee Island.

Twenty years ago, I stopped by the local civic center, on a whim, which was hosting a model train convention.

Now, I’m no train enthusiast, but there are granddads and dads and children all being kids together, so why not?

I walk in and meet some nice people; one man telling me of some very historic parts of his collection — he’d accidentally been given the paperwork that documents J.P. Morgan’s purchase of an entire railroad; three men talking at length about how best to paint a cliff face and so on. But the best part was stumbling onto a booth with college merchandise.

I found this tapestry that I love. I got it for a song.

Now I just need to figure out how to display it, without it being used for cover.

Funny the things you do, and don’t remember.

We return to the Re-Listening project, which is where I pad the page out with music. I’m doing this because I am currently re-listening to all of my old CDs, in the order of their acquisition, in the car. It’s a wonderful trip down memory lane and I’m dragging you along, because the music is good.

Today we’ll do a double entry, since it is back-to-back of the same act. I picked these up in 2004, but the albums are older than that. If we’re going back to my first listen in 2004, we have to hop in the time machine and go back another decade to when Barenaked Ladies released “Maybe You Should Drive.” It was their second studio album, and went double platinum at home in Canada, where it peaked at number three. It was the band’s first visit to the US charts, sneaking in at 175 on the Billboard 200.

The first of two singles, “Jane” was an instant catalog classic for Steven Page.

There’s a lot of great work from Page on this record. Here’s one more fan-favorite, the second single, which just feels like a deep cut at this point.

I picked up this CD after a handful of the later BNL records, and several shows. So many of the songs I knew. (Three of these tracks are on Rock Spectacle, which was my first BNL purchase.) And so I don’t know when I first heard this song from Ed Robertson, but it’s one of those beautiful works that I’d like to be able to hear again for the first time.

The day I bought “Maybe You Should Drive” I also picked up “Born On A Pirate Ship,” and I wish I remember, now, where I got them. But because I got them together, these CDs have always belonged together. The former came out in 1994, the latter was the followup, released in 1996. It was another hit in Canada, peaking at number 12, and captured more American ears. “The Old Apartment” was a breakthrough single and video, and Pirate Ship went to 111 in the American Billboard chart. It was certified gold four years later. Andy Creegan had left the band, Kevin Hearn came in soon after, but this is a four-piece record.

It is peak 1990s Canada pop.

I still think this is a song about a dog, Catholicism and a bunch of other random things. It’s inscrutable.

People that just knew BNL from airplay — well the Americans anyway — will recall this as their first song.

It used to be that “When I Fall” seemed like it had to be a full, live show performance. But then Robertson played it in one of the Bathroom Sessions, and you heard it in a different way entirely.

Page will occasionally remind you he’s working on a different level. This is one of those times. Seeing it live is the preferable way* to take in this song, so go back with me to a time when it’s amazing we had washed-out-color video and you can’t explain the tracking squiggles to the children of the future. But don’t fixate on that, follow the performance.

That song … Steven Page … it just feels like it should be a misdemeanor to not know anything more than their later pop hits.

*I think karaoke would be another ideal way to hear “Break Your Heart,” but that’s just me.

One of two Jim Creeggan songs on Pirate Ship, this one sneaks up on you every time, which isn’t creepy at all. And for four minutes it just gets better and better and better, and bigger and bigger, even when it lulls, which is a lot of fun.

And here’s Creegan’s other track, which refuses to fit in any pop music mold.

BNL is touring the US this summer, though we won’t be able to see them. We did catch them last year though, which was the third time we’d seen them in two or three years. Everyone wishes Steven Page was still in the band, most everyone has wished that for 15 years, but aside from the 2018 Juno Awards celebration of the Canadian Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame induction, that may never happen. (Though they haven’t definitively ruled it out, and that’s what hope is aboot.) The band stills put on energetic rock ‘n’ roll shows. They’re very much worth seeing.

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21
May 24

Still a new sensation

I had a nice chat this morning with a lady from the next town over. She told me about an ice cream place she takes her children near me. I told her of an ice cream place nearer to her. On Saturday a man came by to upgrade our modem. He was a local fellow, too. He told me all about the little towns around us where he grew up. How they’ve changed, what they offer, the people that call them home.

I mention this because, even though they have little in common and there’s no through-line between the two experiences, it can be delightful meeting people who are proud of where they’re from.

It’s another day to marvel at how well the plants flourish. On the southern side of the house, sheltered from the morning sun, but thrive in the western sun. I caught this in the early afternoon. Sometimes the flowers outside can distract you from the task of making lunch inside.

This evening we were out in the yard, admiring our recent landscaping and lawn maintenance, and I noticed the moon was on it’s way up in the east. For some reason, my lovely bride didn’t think I could take a photo of it. I said I could, if she did a handstand.

And so the neighborhood watch may now revise down their estimation of our age. A plus! Also, I got the moon in my photo. Count your wins, all of ’em, big and small.

Let us return to the Re-Listening project, because I am several records behind. That has been the status quo of this project for almost a full year now, so there’s no need to jump up and down. We’ll catch up eventually. (My CD collection is, after all, finite.) The Re-Listening project, if you’ve not noticed it’s occasional appearance here, is the one where I listen to all of my old CDs in the car, in the order in which I acquired them. (More or less.) There’s a small period where those details are hazy, and it doesn’t really matter. This whole exercise is simply an excuse to listen to some music and, when I get around to writing about it here, share some music, fill some space, and maybe bring to the fore some old memory that is tied to a song, an album, a performer or an experience.

Let’s see which one we get to in this installment!

In 1987 Australia’s INXS followed up on their American breakthrough, taking the world by storm on their sixth studio album. “Kick” was certified six-times platinum, peaking at number three on the Billboard 200. The band wanted every song to potentially be a single, and if you listen to the whole thing through your late 1980s prism, they got pretty close. There were four top 10 singles, including a number one, and they’ve all become new wave, pop rock classics.

I picked this up in 2004 or thereabouts, and the circumstances behind that are forgotten and it was probably altogether unremarkable. But I never had it, I needed it, and that’s enough.

“New Sensation” was the third single, released in March 1988, and I was still trying to do the coolest things with this song at my campus station in the 1990s and in commercial radio just after the turn of the century.

It’s a good song with which to really test the limits of legal IDs is all.

Perhaps it was that first single, September 1987, that introduced me to INXS. (It was just a question of timing, but I came to 1985’s “What You Need” later.) MTV was, by then, a fixture, and this was in heavy rotation. Wikipedia tells me that Andrew Farriss was inspired by the guitar lick while waiting for a cab. He went inside to record it, and 45 minutes later, returned to find a furious cab driver. I wonder if anyone every followed up with that guy. Michael Hutchence heard the cab demo and pulled most of the lyrics together in just a few minutes.

There are a lot of successful songs that have this supposed sort of origin story. I wonder if, when that happens, the people pulling it together know they are really onto something.

Also, there are a number of them that could be considered quintessential 1980s music videos, that one is on this list. Everything about it is weird and odd and right.

And then they tacked on “Mediate,” because when they played that demo in the studio, the engineer stumbled into a happy accident that the two worked so perfectly he thought something was wrong.

Art is sometimes serendipitous.

Art sometimes copies others. If the “Mediate” video seems familiar, Bob Dylan would like you to know he did it first, 23 years earlier.

And, I just learned that in 2003, almost 40 years after Dylan defined it and some 15 years after INXS perfected it, Weird Al Yankovich spoofed it.

Back to “Kick,” they wound up releasing something like seven singles off of the 12-track effort. It got so out of hand that “Mystify” had a comparatively quiet peak at number 17 on the Billboard Album Rock Tracks chart.

On any other record “Calling All Nations” would have been a new wave hit. “Tiny Daggers,” from several decades away feels like a teen movie soundtrack stalwart, or an obvious 1980s hit.

The band continued on after Hutchence’s death in 1997. They continued on until 2012. But they’re still putting out material of a sort. Just last month they released a behind the scenes feature on “Never Tear Us Apart.”

The whole thing is Prague, just before the Velvet Revolution.

Modern listeners, in the “first time” genre, agree.

And this one is hysterical. I’ve queued it to the moment where she is feeling some feelings.

It’s a remarkable record, really. They sold almost 10 million units internationally in those first two years when “Kick” was everywhere. By the time they re-released it in 2012 to celebrate 25 years, they’d move something like 20 million units. Because you can’t cash in enough, Universal Music re-re-mastered it and re-released it in time for the 30th anniversary, in 2017, in a package with 3CD+Blu-rays and 2LP vinyls, and digital media. (What, no cassettes?)

Next time we do the Re-Listening project, we’ll move from Australia to Canada. I wonder who that could be, eh?

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20
May 24

‘From the Dairy Queen to the head of the parade’

On Friday we went across the river. And that’s how you know it was a special day, because there was a bridge involved. So, once again, we must applaud the civil engineers. Their work allows for a lot of life’s parties to happen. And it was no different on that fine day, as we went over the Commodore Barry Bridge …

My god-sister-in-law (just go with it) told us about a concert. A lunchtime concert. Rock ‘n’ roll at lunch. Also, it was a free show from XPN. So we saw Guster do a 35-minute set as they promote their new album. In fact, it was released on Friday. In fact, I got a push notification about it while we are at the show.

It was a fun, if altogether too-short, set.

They were playing on a lot of rental equipment because they were in New York and their truck broke down. For not knowing all of the gear, everything came off pretty well. That’s 30-or-so years of touring will do for you, I guess.

In that time I have now seen Guster in … five states, but never in the middle of the afternoon.

Lunchtime concerts, I could get used to that.

In the late afternoon, or the very earliest part of the evening, my lovely bride called me to the backyard to meet a new friend.

He was a big boy. We weren’t sure where he came from — the nearest water is a considerable hop away — or where he should go. So I showed him the woods. Hopefully I sent him into the right direction.

Speaking of critters, let’s check on the kitties. Poseidon, for his part, is upset we didn’t introduce him to the frog. Poe is always looking for new friends.

Ours are indoor cats, and what they know of other animals they see through windows. I wonder what they’d do if they were confronted by an oversized amphibian.

I wonder if Phoebe would even be impressed.

Probably. She likes hoping around, too.

We had a nice ride this weekend, and it featured a freshly paved road, a road that was just reopened on Friday evening. You somehow go a little faster on new asphalt.

It was pretty good for me throughout. My fastest split was at mile 16. And, then, at 19.70, my legs decided they’d done enough. That’s when I decided I need to ride a lot more, too. But, hey, it’s summertime, I figured, and so I’ll have more time — and that’s when she blew by me for the last time on the ride, in one powerful, speedy little flourish, over a roller, turning to the left, down and up two small hills, not to be seen again.

Yep. I need to ride more. And, also, to go to more rock ‘n’ roll shows.

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15
May 24

Do you know what “parados” means?

Rainy again, today, and just barely into the 60s. And at least four or five more days of the same. It has been, on balance, a wonderful way to experience … let me just check the calendar here … May.

At this point it’s just funny, really. I’m not even sure, as I type these letters into the word box, what the ideal weather would be, or if it matters. I don’t have to wear a heavy coat or stay under a blanket or shovel anything, and there’s no dangerous storm bearing down on me, so any manner of weather is fine, I suppose.

We’ve got a sign on the front porch, and it says “Hello, Summer!” It is prepared for the somewhat plausible eventuality.

I went for a bike ride this evening. First one in weeks. First there was work, and then there was grading and then I spent all my time visiting with family. So, it was nice to get outside, and nice to have another restart to riding. (This is the way it always works: stops and starts.)

It was cool at first. Almost chilly, even. And then the rain started. I just rode around a few neighborhoods for an hour to wake up my legs and practice clearing the rain droplets from my glasses.

You don’t always appreciate the small skills in life. There’s an art to taking off your glasses, banging them against your person, shaking them at arm’s reach and then trying to put them back on your face. It’s nothing, really, but you must do it every so often because the things you do while riding a bike aren’t always just like riding a bike.

Here’s the thing. It’s the height of style to make sure the arms of your glasses are worn outside the straps of your helmet. This is easy when you have standard, rigid glasses. Place, then slide. But since it was late and gray and raining, I did not wear my usual glasses, but, instead, I was wearing a pair of clear lenses.

They’re actually safety glasses, just about the cheapest pair you can buy at a box store. I probably wouldn’t wear them when real eye safety was a concern, but I picked them up for working under a kitchen counter. If all you must do is keep rust and things from falling into your eyeballs, they were worth the six bucks. But I’d wear something a bit thicker if things were flying with more speed than gravity or had more heft than crumbs of ruined metal. They are terribly, wonderfully lightweight, which, when the repair job was done, made me think I could use them for bike rides. Sometimes you don’t want dark lenses, but you do want to keep bugs or rain out of your eyes. So clear lenses! And these, again, were cheap. And lightweight!

Also, the arms of the glasses are basically the cheapest, most flexible bits of rubber the 20th century ever devised. And they don’t easily go over the outside of the helmet straps. So, for a time, I was riding and breaking one of the important rules. Yes, it’s in the rules.

Rule 37 // The arms of the eyewear shall always be placed over the helmet straps. No exceptions.
This is for various reasons that may or may not matter; it’s just the way it is.

It doesn’t matter. None of this matters. We do it anyway.

Let us, one last time, return to California. This is my last video from our trip in March. If stretching things out two months seems excessive, it is!

I made this video for our friends’ daughter. She loves all the fish in my SCUBA diving videos, and she asked, specifically, if we found Nemo in the Gulf of Mexico when we were diving off Cozumel and Quintana Roo. I did not find Nemo there. I found Nemo, instead, in central California.

I’m hoping this video will make her smile.

I’ll let you know.

It’s time once more for We Learn Wednesdays, where we discover the county’s historical markers via bike rides. This is the 35th installment, and the 63rd and 64th markers in the We Learn Wednesdays series. I’m grouping them together because there’s not a lot to say about this particular set.

So, we’ll return to our tour of Fort Mott, where we have recently we saw the old gun batteries and then the observation towers that helped them in their work of defending the river and Philadelphia, beyond.

In its day, Fort Mott was a self-contained military community featuring more than 30 buildings here, including a hospital, a PX, a library, a school and more.

Here’s a not-bad map that’ll give you some idea of the layout. The river is on the left side of this drawing. You can see the pier jutting out into the water. Just above that you’ll see the long row of gun placements. Let’s look behind them. Note the blue bit in the map.

That’s the moat. The engineers had the idea that while the big weapons were defending against vessels sailing up the river, they needed to protect themselves from anyone sneaking up behind them.

On one side of the fort is the river. Since it sits, essentially, at a point on the shoreline, the river also shields another side. Still a third side looks protected by thick wooded terrain and narrow creeks. That one direction opposite the moat is about the only approach an enemy would have, though it is difficult to imagine how anyone could get there to begin with. So we need a moat, and a parados.

The workers dug, by hand, 200,000 tons of sand, soil, and rock. Apparently $1.25 in 1897 is worth less than 48 bucks in 2024 money.

That doesn’t strike me as a lot for moving 10,000 pounds of earth a day.

The parados (Spanish for rear door) is the earthen hill adjacent to the gun battery. It serve as a shield against gunfire from the rear. Construction of the moat and parados at Fort Mott began in 1897 and took over two years to complete.

The earth used to build the parados came from digging the moat; 44,500 cubic yards of earth, over 200,000 tons, was moved with grapples, wheelbarrows, and shovels. The work was grueling. Each man was expected to move nearly five tons of earth daily for a wage of $1.25.

The moat was constructed by hand using shovels and wheelbarrows. Mules were used to help move soil and shape the parados.

The parados originally reflected the “mirror image” of the moat. This feature provided a substantial obstacle to help thwart the advance of an enemy force attempting to capture the main gate line, as well as protect the gun crews from enemy artillery fire.

Here are some of the still standing and preserved barracks the soldiers lived in, just behind the gun emplacements.

I’m pretty sure this window unit was standard gear at the beginning of the 20th century.

An important part of their creature comforts …

Two latrines were built within the parados for soldiers assigned to the gun batteries. The bathrooms each had several toilets for enlisted men, a private stall for officers and a large cast-iron urinal.

Toilets were similar to our modern flush toilets, except that the plumbing took the waste directly to the moat and not to a septic system. Since the moat was tidal and controlled by a sluice gate, the sewage was flushed out into the Delaware River with each tidal change. In addition to the practical necessity of the latrines, this system also served as part of an overall defense strategy: any enemy who tried to cross the moat first had to get through the sewage.

First … eww.

Second … also ewwww.

Thirdly, what if this one engineering choice prevented any invasion plans anyone was considering in the early 20th century. Suppose some Spaniards or Canadians came down, saw that and realized they couldn’t get their men to sneak through a stinky sewer moat to capture a fort so their ships could sail up the river.

Also, the insects out there are pretty intense, too. Not only would you have to wade through that moat, you’d have all sorts of insect bites.

Finally, the state put these signs in. The state needs to update them.

Made obsolete when nearby Fort Saulsbury opened just after World War I. The last soldiers were removed in 1922, the fort became a state park in 1951.

If you’ve missed any markers so far, you can find them all right here.

More tomorrow. Another bike ride! And maybe some other things, too!

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14
May 24

First you make it, then bake it, then you eat it, and do it again

I decided to go for a run today. It was, I figured, too gray and chilled and wet to ride my bike for the first time in forever. So I may as well try my first run in forever.

Just at the bottom of the driveway I received a text from my lovely bride. She was trying to figure out dinner, and did I have any ideas. I thought and I thought, standing there by the road feeling quite silly about the whole thing, and then said, “What about a ziti? And then we can have several dinners planned out.”

We run a menu calendar for dinners at home, and that’s my job. Every so often, I take all of our regular meals, there are about 90 of them, put them in a randomized order and then load them to the calendar. I might be behind on it just now. That would mean we have to make up ideas, and that means I get that question a lot, and I don’t always have great answers. But ziti, I figured, gives us leftovers, and that means I won’t get that question tomorrow.

You’re playing checkers, I’m playing Parisses squares.

That answer was agreeable, so I set off on my run. Four-tenths of a mile later, I got another text. Could I check on the supply of ricotta at home, and also the sauce. So I turned around and ran back. No ricotta, no sauce. And then I set off on my run again.

I was sure to run extra fast, so that I could get in the run, such as it was, before any more requests came in.

It was a short run, I still beat her home.

The rose bushes, we have about nine of them, are all flourishing. Well, eight of them. One is potted, and I have given up on that quitter. But just look at these others.

And they smell soft and delightful, like a nice tea bathed in an old perfume. Whatever that means.

It’s funny, all of these just stayed outside, in the ground, all winter and we did nothing at all to them and now they’re in full bloom. The potted one I brought inside, put under a grow light and watered and misted all winter. It’s barely hanging on.

Maybe it’s the soil, or the pot, or me.

Let’s now return to the Re-Listening project. This has become an irregular feature, which explains why I am behind just now. The Re-Listening project, though, takes place in the car. I am playing all of my old CDs, in the order that I acquired them. I am writing about them here, sporadically, to add a little content. Also, we can play some music. And, sometimes, there are some memories. These aren’t reviews, because none of us care about that, but it might otherwise be fun.

And so we go back to 2004, so that we can revisit 2003’s “Some Devil” by Dave Matthews. I think I got this from a library sale, or someone burned it for me. It was a solo release, and the tone is a bit different than DMB’s signature style. I don’t remember this, but Wikipedia tells me fans were skeptical of the solo release, but it nevertheless debuted at number 2 on the Billboard 200 album charts. It took Outkast’s diamond-certified Speakerboxxx/The Love Below to keep it from the top spot.

“Gravedigger” hit 35 on the Billboard Adult Top 40 and on the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart. It won a Grammy for Best Male Rock Vocal Performance. Not bad for an almost “Eleanor Rigby” story. The album went platinum. It is, to me, a mostly forgettable record? Which is to say I never really attached any meaning to it.

I like this one.

And here’s the title track, which does indeed sound different from what you’d expect of 1990s DMB.

The incomparable Tim Reynolds and Trey Anastasio, and a host of other talented people are on the album. And the whole thing is just the sort of thing I can put on and ignore. There’s nothing wrong with that. It seems like I’m always on the search for just that sort of thing. But I’m mystified as to why this never made a bigger impression on me — and why it still doesn’t. That probably says more about me than the ones and zeros encoded on the disc.

Also, as of this writing, it is the last Dave Matthews CD I ever picked up. I guess I just had enough of the catalog to serve my needs.

Dave Matthews Band, of course, is touring this summer. I saw them a few times before concerts got outrageously priced. It was them, I am convinced, that started that trend. It looks like you’d pay $200 a pop for balcony seats at one of their shows near us this summer. That’s become my biggest Dave memory, sadly.

Anyway, time for dinner. The first ziti of the week.

(Ha! She made two casserole dishes. We might not have to decide dinner until Saturday!)